Wisconsin public school salaries inconsistent

Jan. 12, 2013

Teacher and administrator salaries vary widely across Wisconsin's public school system, even among districts of similar size and location, a Gannett Wisconsin Media Investigative Team analysis found. / Gannett Wisconsin Media photo

About ‘What We Pay’The compensation of public-sector employees has dominated much of Wisconsin’s political and economic discussion over the past few years. But what’s been lacking in that discussion is a way to compare what those employees earn in various places, in various circumstances. “What We Pay: Your tax dollars and the salaries they support” attempts to give you a way to make those comparisons, so that you can be better informed about how your taxes are used. To compile an exhaustive database of Wisconsin’s public employees, Gannett Wisconsin Media filed 181 open records requests with government agencies and spent more than seven months, sending hundreds of emails and phone calls to ensure the requests were fulfilled under state statute. The result is a collection of more than 250,000 names, covering every Wisconsin public employee earning more than $25,000 in the most recent available fiscal year. The listing includes state, federal and U.S. Postal Service employees, as well as those who work in Wisconsin’s 72 counties; 91 cities, counties or villages with a population of 10,000 or more; 26 University of Wisconsin campuses; 16 technical colleges and 424 public school districts. Those names are all available on the online searchable databases at through the link on this page. In print, we’re publishing names of local public employees who earned more than $50,000 in the most recent available fiscal year. We requested names, titles, years of experience, current and prior year salary, overtime and benefits for all employees, though not all entities were able to produce all requested data. Many entities provided records promptly, but others took months to respond, claimed incorrectly that the records were not subject to open records law or attempted to charge hefty fees. In the end, we spent about $9,000 reimbursing entities for their work, since state statute allows certain costs to be recovered. The school, state and federal employee data was provided digitally, but some cities and counties provided segmented or hard-copy data, which was hand-entered into digital form. Once the results were checked and double-checked, the data was built into searchable online databases that are being published in “What We Pay: Your tax dollars and the salaries they support” reporting project. What We Pay: TimelineSunday, Jan. 6: University of Wisconsin System, Wisconsin Technical College System Sunday, Jan. 13: Public school districts Sunday, Jan. 20: State of Wisconsin Monday, Jan. 21: Federal and USPS Sunday, Jan. 27: Cities, towns, villages (populations over 10,000) Sunday, Feb. 3: Counties

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Teacher and administrator salaries vary widely across Wisconsin’s public school system, even among districts of similar size and location, a Gannett Wisconsin Media Investigative Team analysis found.

The state’s 423 districts have final say over their own employee salaries, which means teachers who perform the same or similar duties can earn significantly more or less depending on where they work.

In Outagamie County, base pay for teachers in the Kaukauna Area School District averaged just under $62,000 in 2011-12, while nearby Hortonville Area School District teachers averaged $49,000. Enrollment in the two districts is nearly identical.

In Marinette County, teachers in the tiny Niagara district averaged $52,000, while Marinette School District teachers averaged $9,000 less, despite working in a district nearly five times larger.

The trend continued around the state, with average salaries varying by $9,000 or more in districts of similar size in Fond du Lac, Ozaukee, Rock, Sheboygan and Waukesha counties, according to the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction.

A similar discrepancy exists in district administrators’ pay, with the highest salary sometimes going to small districts with less-than-stellar academic performance.

Many reasons for pay range

Average teacher salaries in Wisconsin in 2011-12 ranged from a high of $72,000 at Nicolet High School in Glendale (which is its own district) to a low of exactly half that — $36,000 at Gilmanton School District, southwest of Eau Claire. The figures include projected base salary only, not additional pay for coaching or overseeing other extracurricular activities.

Officials say pay can vary depending on the number of years employees have worked for the district and their education level. The districts’ financial limitations and the local economy also can affect salaries.

The state’s highest-paid full-time principal last year was at Whitefish Bay High School, which is 107th-largest high school in the state but is in a village where median household income is more than $100,000.

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“There are many labor market trends that play out across the state, and … the school districts have to incorporate those trends just like any employer does,” said DPI spokesman John Johnson.

District enrollment is often a key indicator for salaries, but it’s far from a direct relationship, particularly for teachers.

The four highest-paid administrators in 2011-12 were those in four of the five largest districts — Milwaukee, Madison, Kenosha and Green Bay. But the 10 highest salaries also included administrators in the Greendale, Peshtigo, River Falls and Whitefish Bay districts, each of which has 3,000 students or less. And the Racine Unified School District, the state’s fourth-largest, ranked 39th for administrator salary.

Among the state’s 50 largest districts, 32 ranked in the top 50 for district administrator salary, and 24 were in the top 50 for average teacher pay.

Peshtigo School District in Marinette County had the 10th-highest paid administrator in the state, despite ranking 168th in size. And Peshtigo Middle/High School Principal Stephen Motkowski ranked eighth among full-time principals at $127,000.

Peshtigo district administrator Kim Eparvier, who made $163,000 in 2011-12, and the school board president did not return repeated phone calls seeking comment, but Miles Turner, executive director of the Wisconsin Association of School District Administrators, said Eparvier’s pay is likely related to past tension with the teacher’s union, which had sought to have him removed.

“He’s just a high-quality person, and they — like business — have the option to pay for high quality, somebody that’s been through the wars and doing a good job,” Turner said.

Turner said salary variations among teachers and administrators show districts simply have different priorities, with some willing to pay more for stability. Some seek recent college graduates to keep costs down, others pay more for experienced educators, and still others limit searches by education level or other factors.

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Mary Bell, president of the Wisconsin Education Association Council, said salary variations are often tied to communities’ varying financial strength — a disparity she said is exacerbated by state cuts.

“Reduction in state funding support, along with tight restrictions on local levies for a long time that exacerbated the funding differentials in these districts, has created even wider differences in the programming, as well as the compensation of employees in those districts,” Bell said in an e-mail.

Teacher pay, performance not linked

The DPI does not generate district-level academic rankings, but a sense of district achievement can be gained by averaging the scores given to individual schools in the DPI report cards released in October.

Based on those scores, teacher pay and school performance don’t often intersect.

Only 18 of the 50 districts with the highest teacher pay were also among the top 50 for average school report card score. Gilmanton had the 24th-best report card score despite its state-low average teacher salary, and the highest-scoring district — Richfield — ranked 338th for administrator salary and 147th for average teacher salary.

Johnson noted the average would not include schools that were not able to be scored — a group that includes many charter schools. The average could downgrade some districts because schools fell short on criteria individually that the district would not have lost points on if scored as a whole.

Wild Rose School District in Waushara County had the 14th-highest score despite teacher salaries in the bottom 15 percent. District Administrator Claude Olson said he was not surprised to see little correlation between report card scores and employee pay across the state.

“Our state is transitioning and moving toward a different way of evaluating staff, and determining teacher effectiveness, and the part of the puzzle that remains to be solved, I think, is how you evaluate staff members based on student performance,” Olson said.

Johnson said DPI is working to develop better teacher evaluation systems, but DPI is two or three years away from statewide implementation. And even then the systems may not be useful in discussing pay levels. The systems are designed to improve instruction, not inform pay decisions, he said.

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“You need to really make sure that it’s a valid and fair evaluation system before you can even discuss, I think, tying compensation to that,” Johnson said.

Bell said she’s not aware of any current teacher performance data that she would “feel comfortable using” as a factor in teacher pay.

Teacher benefits drop by 16%

Gov. Scott Walker’s overhaul of collective bargaining exerted downward pressure on salaries throughout the public school system, and DPI data appear to show the first impacts of that.

Statewide, average teacher benefits fell from nearly $28,000 in 2010-11 to just more than $23,000 in 2011-12 — a drop of nearly 16 percent. Base salary for the approximately 60,000 full-time teachers averaged $53,613 in 2011-12, down $323 from the 2010-11 but still more than $2,000 above the 2009-10 level, according to DPI. Salary records were submitted by districts around November 2011, five months after the Act 10 collective bargaining changes took effect.

Among the 423 public school districts, the average teacher salary fell from 2010-11 to 2011-12 in 282 districts, and average teacher benefits dropped in 406 districts. The average years of experience per teacher fell from 14.8 to 14.2.

NCES calculates the average teacher pay in Wisconsin slightly higher, around $55,000, which ranks 17th among the 50 states and the District of Columbia. Illinois ($66,000) was seventh and Michigan ($65,000) eighth, while Minnesota ($55,000) came in at 18th and Iowa ($51,000) at 26th. The national average was $56,643.

As for district administrators, a look at available data in neighboring states shows Wisconsin lagging. In 2011-12, Wisconsin had four administrators paid $170,000 or more, compared to 24 in Minnesota, 17 in Iowa and 10 in Ohio, according to government and media databases.

All four states had about 40 administrators who were paid $150,000 or more and four or fewer administrators paid more than $200,000 — Milwaukee and Madison administrators, in the case of Wisconsin.

Pay for administrators in Illinois was significantly higher, with 183 paid more than $200,000 and seven topping $300,000.